Mary AbbottBRAG 200 X 200 YEARS 200 200 WORKS 27 MARCH - 14 JUNE 2015 Artists A to Z MARY ABBOTT (NEE ROBERTS) 4 REGINALD EARLE CAMPBELL 21 JAN ALEXANDER 5 JUDY CASSAB 22 RICK AMOR 6 JOHN COBURN 23 JEAN APPLETON 7 WILL COLES 24 TULLY ARNOT 8 MARTIN COYTE 25 DAVID ASPDEN 9 ELIZABETH CUMMINGS 26 JOSEPH BACKLER 10 GREG DALY 27 GEORGE BALDESSIN 11 LAWRENCE DAWS 28 LIONEL BAWDEN 12 ROY DE MAISTRE 29 RICHARD BELL 13 ROBERT DICKERSON 30 JEAN BELLETTE 14 RUSSELL DRYSDALE 31 CHARLES BLACKMAN 15 RUBY EAVES 32 LES BLACKEBROUGH 16 RACHEL ELLIS 33 ARTHUR BOYD 17 JOHN FIRTH-SMITH 34 MERRIC BOYD 18 EDITH MARY FOX 35 JOHN BRACK 19 DONALD FRIEND 36 EVELYN CAMPBELL 20 MERRICK FRY 37 HECTOR GILLILAND 38 JOANNE LOGUE 56 JAMES GLEESON 39 SIDNEY LONG 57 GWYN HANSSEN PIGOTT 40 GRAHAM LUPP 58 JOHN HARDMAN LISTER 41 FRANCIS LYMBURNER 59 JESSE JEWHURST HILDER 42 ELWYN LYNN 60 MARGEL HINDER 43 ROSEMARY MADIGAN 61 FIONA HISCOCK 44 SHEILA LETHBRIDGE MCDONALD 62 DAVID JAMES 45 CLEMENT MEADMORE 63 JONATHAN JONES 46 FRANK MEDWORTH 64 HERBERT KEMBLE 47 DANIE MELLOR 65 PETER KINGSTON 48 JOHN OLSEN 66 ROBERT KLIPPEL 49 DESIDERIUS ORBAN 67 GEORGE WASHINGTON LAMBERT 50 JENNY ORCHARD 68 GEORGE FEATHER LAWRENCE 51 ALAN PEASCOD 69 LIONEL LINDSAY 52 ADELAIDE PERRY 70 PERCY LINDSAY 53 THEA PROCTOR 71 MATILDA LISTER 54 PIERRE JOSEPH REDOUTE 72 WILLIAM LISTER LISTER 55 NORMA REDPATH 73 LLOYD REES 74 DAVID BRIAN WILSON 92 WILLIAM ROBINSON 75 TIM WINTERS 93 JO ROSS 76 ROSWITHA WULFF 94 JOAN ROSS 77 ANTHONY DATTILO RUBBO 78 HUI SELWOOD 79 WENDY SHARPE 80 ANNEKE SILVER 81 ERIC SMITH 82 GRACE COSSINGTON SMITH 83 EUGENIE SOLANOV 84 TONY TUCKSON 85 ROSEMARY VALADON 86 PRUE VENABLES 87 GREG WEIGHT 88 NICOLE WELCH 89 BRETT WHITELEY 90 FRED WILLIAMS 91 MARY ABBOTT (NEE ROBERTS) (1916 - 1966) Cocktail Bar Mainly educated at the Sydney Commercial Art School and the Julian Ashton Art School, Mary Abbott’s talents were wide ranging. In addition to teaching, she was highly interested in commercial art and studied fine arts in the areas of painting portraits and landscapes, jewellery and fashion artistry. In 1958 Abbott relocated from Sydney to Bathurst where she became involved in the local art scene through the Bathurst Society of Music and Arts. In “Cocktail Bar”, she has used one model as the basis for the three figures. JAN ALEXANDER (1927 - 2012) The wrath of sinful man restrain. Give peace, O God, give peace again Jan Alexander was an artist active in Bathurst for thirty years from the 1970s to the early 2000s. She was a committee member and a long term supporter of Bathurst Regional Art Gallery Society during these years. She advocated that art was for everyone. Jan grew up along the Lachlan River west of Forbes. She moved to Bathurst with her young family in the 1960s. Jan said in 1996: “In all my work, I try to extend and explore the mysterious language of creativity to produce personal images that question and challenge. Inspiration comes from a life experience, a brush with people, a news flash, a musical note or a bird’s song.” Jan’s art – painting, sculpture, mixed media and drawing – expressed her concerns with social issues and the events of everyday life. She worked in a range of media including inks, charcoal, chalk, woodblock printing, acrylic, oil and watercolour, and liked to experiment with unusual materials. Jan exhibited in five solo exhibitions and her work was included in numerous selection-prize exhibitions including the Bathurst Art Purchase, Maitland Drawing Prize, Mornington Festival of Drawing (twice), Print and Drawing Show Swan Hill (three times), Portia Geach Memorial (three times), and the Blake Prize Exhibition. Jan also exhibited in joint exhibitions with fellow Bathurst artists Jo Ross and Lyn Denman in ‘Three Bathurst Artists’ at the Bathurst Regional Art Gallery during September and October 2000. Jan studied and worked with a number of artists including Mary Abbott, Michael Winters, Jo Ross and David Wilson. Jan tutored children in art through the Young Ideas Program and in private lessons. She believed strongly in encouraging children to study art to enrich their lives and heighten their powers of observation. Awards include Parkes Contemporary Painting Prize, Orange Drawing Prize, Orange Print Prize, Mudgee Drawing Purchase Prize, and Faber Castell Drawing Award. Jan’s works are held in private collections in Bathurst, Sydney, Melbourne, Canada and the UK. Compiled by Wendy Alexander 30/3/2015 RICK AMOR (b. 1948) Maquette for “Figure in a Landscape” Rick Amor (born Victoria 1948) has been a quiet presence in the Australian art scene for more than 30 years. In 1965 he completed a Certificate of Art at the Caulfield Institute of Art and from 1966 to 1968 studied at the National Gallery School, Melbourne. An equally talented painter and sculptor, Amor is perhaps better known for his paintings. Since the early 1990’s, Amor has ‘blown hot and cold with sculpture’, creating mostly bronze figures which he moulds in his studio and then sends to a foundry to finish the process. In 2007 Amor’s sculpture Relic won the prestigious McClelland Award for Sculpture, placing him firmly within the ranks of Australia’s best sculptors. His works all deal with the concepts of mortality and the human condition, many bordering on the edge of melancholy. He favours lone solitary figures usually coupled with stark skeletal trees like those in Man in Landscape (included in this exhibition). Amor shows annually at Niagara Galleries and has had over 50 solo exhibitions to date. Perhaps the most important exhibition of his bronze sculptures was undertaken by Benalla Art Gallery in 2002, including many maquettes never previously exhibited. Rick Amor lives and works in Melbourne. He is represented by Niagara Galleries, Melbourne and Liverpool St Gallery, Sydney. JEAN APPLETON (1911 - 2003) Interior with Figure Jean Appleton, textile designer and painter of landscape and still life, had a distinguished career as an artist and teacher. In 1932 she graduated from East Sydney Technical College where the course was limited to drawing and illustration, but she did a little work in oils for her diploma. She studied at the Westminster School in England for three years under teachers who were important figures in the modern movement in British painting. She went through the stage of being semi-abstract in the 1960’s, when she won the Darcy Morris Prize for Religious Art. A self-portrait won the inaugural Portia Geach Prize in 1965. The painting, “Interior with Figure” (102 x 90) is oil on Masonite. It is a low key tonal work with broken colour. In the design, shapes are repeated for emphasis. The figure of her daughter Libby is in darkness yet the eye is drawn to it. There is a use of complementary colours with accents of rich warm reds and cool darks to balance. Though many of her subjects were similar to Grace Cossington Smith’s, the method of work was completely different. Cossington Smith worked continuously with blobs of colour, from the top left hand corner right through the painting, with no painting over. Appleton started with a few shapes right through the picture, working and reworking until satisfied. Appleton was very interested in the study of light – light on surfaces, light reflecting and permeating the subject. This trend started after a trip to England in 1966-69, when she became more conscious of the difference of light in Australia and England. An exhibition of her work at the Painters’ Gallery in 1986 showed pictures flooded with light, the white light of summer. Always in the foreground is a still life, then a background landscape. They are scenes of domesticity with a scale larger than most. You feel you can walk into the room. The paintings of flowers are looser than in her earlier paintings. Appleton was always interested in still life with a view through the window. She had a good visual memory for shapes and colours, and though she had many items from her room in her pictures, the works were completed from memory. TULLY ARNOT Jurassic Cup At first glance the work titled “Jurassic Cup”, by Tully Arnot seems out of place in an art gallery, it seems to simply be a disposable plastic cup. This playful work on further inspection is more complex, perhaps its title gives it away. The inspiration for the work is the 1993 American science fiction adventure film directed by Steven Spielberg based on the novel of the same name by Michael Crichton. The film centres on the fictional Isla Nublar near Costa Rica’s Pacific Coast, where a billionaire philanthropist and a small team of genetic scientists have created a wildlife park of cloned dinosaurs. Arnot’s “Jurassic Cup” refers to a scene in the film where water in a cup starts to vibrate as a massive cloned Tyrannosaurus rex (the largest of the dinosaurs) approaches. If you stand for a while you will observe that the cup has a hidden mechanism that causes the water to vibrate for a certain time frequency. In a sophisticated way Arnot has transcribed the virtual world of film into tangible reality. The magic of this rather simple object is that it conjures questions regarding the boundaries between fact and fiction and how film has come to inform our everyday lives. Robina Booth, Acting Curator, BRAG DAVID ASPDEN (1935 - 2005) Australia II David Aspden was a self-taught painter and teacher who migrated to Australia with his family in 1950. He began his working life as an apprentice painter and sign writer in Port Kembla.